THE AMERICAN BISONS. 103 
Tue Extent oF THE REGION EAST OF THE MISSISSIPPI FORMERLY INHAB- 
ITED BY THE Burra.o, witn A. History or rrs ExvIRPATION THERE- 
FROM. 
The accounts of the first exploration of the region between the Alleghany 
Mountains and the Mississippi River show that the buffalo, early in the 
seventeenth century, existed in vast herds not only on the prairies bor- 
dering the Mississippi, but throughout nearly the whole of the more open 
portions of the area drained by the Ohio River and its tributaries. Its range 
eastward extended nearly or quite to the eastern end of Lake Erie, and 
throughout the valleys among the mountains of Western Pennsylvania, West 
Virginia, Hastern Kentucky, and Eastern Tennessee. It also inhabited the 
region drained by the Illinois River, and by some of the lesser upper east- 
ern tributaries of the Mississippi. The country between the Ohio and the 
Great Lakes was quite generally occupied by them, as was that south of the 
Ohio, between this river and the Tennessee. There is less certainty in 
regard to their former occupation of Southern Michigan and Wisconsin, 
though it is probable that they also at times roamed over most of this 
region also, notwithstanding the fact that they were not found there by the 
first Europeans who visited this section of the country. Considerable docu- 
mentary evidence relating to their former presence over the region between 
the Mississippi and the Alleghanies, together with many references to their 
extermination there, has been brought together in the following pages, and 
is presented generally in the words of the original narrators. Beginning with 
the northwestern portion of the region in question, we shall pass thence 
southward and eastward, giving the facts bearing upon particular localities 
somewhat in a chronological order. 
On the eastern side of the Mississippi River buffaloes were found by the 
early Jesuit explorers oceupying the country from the sources of the Mis- 
sissippi almost uninterruptedly southward nearly to the mouth of the Ohio 
River. Hennepin, as early as 1680, met with them in considerable numbers 
in the vicinity of the St. Francis River, above the Falls of St. Anthony, where 
they were also seen later by other explorers. In 1766 Jonathan Carver 
found them on the plains around Lake Pepin, he speaking of them as “the 
largest buffaloes of any in America.” * Pike, in ascending the Mississippi in 
the autumn of 1804, met with the first signs of this animal about two hun- 
* Travels, p. 56. 
